Re: Two questons: Norwgegian characters and space when switching typeface

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2019-11-04T08:08:57+0100, Xianwen Chen (陈贤文) wrote:
> Dear list,

Hi Xianwen!

> Today is my second day trying out groff.

Welcome aboard!

> I have over a decade experiences with LaTeX and a few years
> experiences with markdown.

If you're familiar with basic concepts of typesetting you should adapt
to groff pretty easily.

> I have two questions.
> 
> First question is on Norwegian characters: ø, å, and æ. It seems that
> I cannot type them as plain text, because the produced PDF file gives
> funny output.

The short answer is that you need to pass groff (or troff, or nroff) the
"-k" flag to have the "preconv" command operate on the input.

> Second question is on the space when switching typefaces.
> 
> Here is an example:
> 
> (See for example,
> I. ABC
> )

You're getting a space here because groff normally interprets every line
break as a word break.

There are a couple of ways around that but first I think we need some
clarification on what you're trying to do.

Are you trying to set "ABC" in italics using a macro package like man or
ms?  If so, you want ".I", not "I.".

In *roff languages, a line beginning with a dot (".") indicates a
request or a macro call.  Dots are not otherwise special (except for
end-of-sentence detection).

> Now, this will produce a space between ABC and ). Is there some way
> that I can get rid of the space there?

Definitely.  In the man macro package for man pages, you'd do this:

(See, for example,
.IR ABC ).

The groff_man(7) man page has more on this.

I've attached a document that renders fine for me with Norwegian
characters (and without using character escapes for that purpose).  It
contains instructions for using itself embedded within.

Regards,
Branden

norvig.roff
Description: Troff document

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature